Chapter Text
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My love, why did you ask me? Why did you beg me? Why did you do this, even though you knew it would damn us all? We can't outrun fate. No one can, not even a de Bois.
Why, my love?
Damn you, Ygraine. Damn you and your husband and your babe-to-be to the deepest of the hells. I hate you, my love. I will hate you for the rest of time. I can't stop thinking it—my love, my love, my love. I can't stop singing it, even when I know what will come to pass.
Damn us all, for loving you.
A king stands alone.
Gwen slips into Arthur’s chambers with a laundry basket propped on her hip. She has changed out of the fine gown she wore to his coronation back into her usual patched kirtle, and tallow smoke clings to her hair and apron. The guards unbar the doors and wave her through without a second glance in her direction.
A king is meant to stand alone, but Gwen will be damned before she lets him.
Arthur is seated at his desk. Agravaine is leaning over his shoulder, pointing at a piece of parchment as he narrates the movements of Camelot's enemies. “Caerleon will come from the east, and her troops will strike fast. We must fortify our defenses along the pass there, and—” he breaks off at the sight of her. “What are you doing here?”
Morgana's troops, knights from Caerleon's army, the Southron mercenaries under Helios—Arthur has inherited a kingdom beset from all sides. Gwen bows, dropping her eyes to the floor. "I'm only changing out the hangings, my lord," she says. The weight of the tapestries in the basket tugs awkwardly at her arms.
Agravaine's gaze rakes over her, heavy as the scrape of stone. He dismisses her with a noncommittal noise, and she turns to her work as Arthur and his uncle continue to discuss Caerleon's movements. The fabric under her hands is marvelously worked with metallic thread, which makes it thick and difficult to maneuver for all its beauty. She sets each panel down with a grunt and hears Agravaine snort under his breath.
"Uncle," Arthur says at last. "It's late. You should retire."
"Really, Arthur?" Agravaine flicks his reed pen to the side. "Can you truly afford to set aside the affairs of the state for a dalliance now?”
Gwen lets the final hanging fall into her basket with a heavy thump. She hopes the tight set of her mouth can be interpreted as abashment rather than what it truly is. “You go too far, Lord Agravaine,” Arthur says, pushing sheaves of parchment to one side of his desk. His voice verges on curt.
Agravaine bows his head. “My apologies, your majesty.” He straightens. “I spoke too harshly.”
Arthur is silent, biting on his tongue. Agravaine hesitates a moment before his face softens. "I will take my leave, then." He kisses Arthur’s forehead, smoothing his hand over his hair. “I forget that you are a boy sometimes—that is how well you bear the crown.”
“Thank you, Uncle.” The corners of Arthur's mouth twitch in a weak smile. “Have a good night.”
The man leaves without acknowledging Gwen's presence. She crouches down, tidying the hangings in her basket until the door closes.
She starts, “Arthur—”
He sighs, rubbing his hands over his eyes. “Please, Gwen,” he says thinly. “Don’t. Not today.”
She rises and crosses the room to hug him, and he sags against her, unmindful of the kitchen-scent strong around her clothes. She can feel his shoulders shaking beneath her palms. “I'm sorry,” he mutters. “But—he's my uncle. There aren’t many I can trust now, you have to understand that."
Gwen sighs. “I know.” Arthur's loyalty to his family has always been fierce, perhaps too much so, and Agravaine now reaps the rewards of his nephew's compounded faith. With Ygraine long gone and Uther newly buried, he is the only one Arthur has left.
"He’s trying. You have to believe he is. He will regard you as you deserve, in time.”
“I don’t care what he thinks about me,” she retorts. “Twenty years in this castle—I’ve lived near my whole life with lords like him. One word to the kitchens and I can make him wish he was living in Brigit’s seventh hell. But there are other things I cannot so easily fix.” The parchment maps on the desk are marked with red, troop movements slashing the page as lash wounds. Caerleon has been attacking Camelot from the east and north, with rumors of sorcerers sworn to Morgana in their midst. Near a score of towns are in danger. “He treats you like a child, Arthur. Even when you are his king.”
“He only wants me to be better.” Arthur pulls away, looking up at her with puffy, tired eyes. The end of Uther's mourning period had only been yesterday, and private grief does not so easily follow the hours. “I might as well still be a child. I cannot yet stand alone.”
“You can.” Gwen sets her hands on his shoulders. “But you shouldn’t have to.”
Thousands now live and die by Arthur’s word and hand. No one should bear such power alone, much less wield it. Uther had stood alone as king, and he was the only king Arthur had ever known—one who executed with fire and built his castle over bones, who stood proud, and alone, and lonely. Gwen leans down and kisses Arthur lightly, cradling his face between her palms. She wants him to feel the resonance in their touch—to realize that he is only as human as she, that her hands are the same as his hands, for all that he wears armor and a crown.
They part when the door hinges creak and relax again when Merlin pokes his head past the threshold. “Is he gone?” he asks, glancing around the room.
“He is a lord, Merlin, and my uncle.” Arthur quirks his lips. “Show him some respect.”
His voice has no bite, and Merlin ignores him. He sidles out from behind the door, three goblets in one hand and a pitcher of strong-smelling wine in the other. The bolt latches behind him. The wine is red-black in the firelight when it is poured, and Gwen takes her cup gladly. It is sweet and pungent, strong enough to burn at the back of her throat and spread a gentle warmth through her chest.
Arthur drains his goblet, and Gwen pours him another draught after she fills her own cup back to the brim. Merlin is the slowest with his drink, sipping at it as he studies the papers next to the pitcher. “Caerleon’s soldiers are coming on fast,” he says after the quiet has stretched and snapped. He tracks the paths of Morgana’s ally with his fingertips. “You need to protect the northern plains. They have more than enough men to capture Ismere and Helva.”
“Remind me,” Arthur says, setting down his goblet. His eyes are downcast, for all that he draws out his words in an uncaring drawl. “What do you know about military strategy?”
Merlin takes the bait. “You've dragged me into council meetings with you for years, I know what—”
“Clearly, those meetings haven’t done anything for you. Approaching from the northern plains would be a fool’s gambit, whereas they have a straight shot to the citadel if they go through the eastern pass—”
“They're raiding the villages and cutting us off first,” Gwen cuts across him. “They wouldn't attack the citadel if they know we can still call on aid from the border towns.”
There are hundreds of people in Ismere and Helva who have sworn allegiance to Camelot. They pay yearly tribute to the castle, in grain and wood and apples fine and fresh, and come into the city for Midsummer and dance with flowers in their hair. They came in the last sennight to hail Arthur as king, and now sleep in rooms in the lower town, preparing for the long journey back through the darkling woods.
“You have their loyalty,” Gwen reminds Arthur.
And they have his. An oath of fealty binds both the servant and the liege, for all that lords are prone to forgetting their people.
Arthur falls silent, tracing the flourishes engraved on the surface of his goblet. “Would she do it?” he asks at last. “She spent her summers in Ismere when she was young. She loved it there.”
Merlin pours himself more wine. Gwen turns away from the two of them to stare into the fire in the hearth. They don’t talk about Morgana unless they have to; they talk about the sorceress, the priestess, the witch, but rarely do they invoke Morgana—Morgana who dreamed, Morgana who smiled. Every mention of Morgana still makes Gwen’s chest ache, as though something had been pried from the cage of her ribs and it is now hollow with a terrible lack. Morgana had told her about Ismere too, on the drizzly days when they sat together and worked on panels for her dresses. No one there regarded her as the daughter of a lord. She ran through its orchards bare-footed and climbed in its trees, and sprained her ankle when she fell from one. She knew all the girls there by name, snuck kisses with them behind the tavern and gave them tokens in the colors of Gorlois and Pendragon both. Ismere was where she had the freedom to be a child, half-wild and eager, greedy for the world.
“She was happy with us,” Gwen whispers. “And that hasn’t stopped her.”
Camelot had been where Morgana spent more than half her life. She and Gwen grew together and came of age in the same summer. Gwen was ten years of age when she first met her lady, and no matter how many winters have passed since then, no matter how much pain her kingdom has borne from Morgana’s anger, there will always be a sliver of her that feels ten still, and adores the beautiful princess who so adored her. The hollowness behind her ribs strikes her at the strangest moments—when she is in the kitchens and finds fresh strawberries on the common table, when she dons her name-day gown, when she takes her dinner with Arthur and sees his sister in his face and his sister’s absence at their table, which is still set for three. Gwen had never realized how much she craved Morgana’s closeness until she was gone.
Hadn’t Morgana been happy with them once?
Yet the Dorocha still cut through Camelot’s people like a knife through soft clay. The pyres still burned for days after the Veil was closed.
Arthur reaches over to the map of their kingdom and sets markers on Helva and Ismere. “We will send knights in the new sennight,” he says, and he picks up his goblet and drinks until there is nothing left save dregs.
Gwen and Merlin sit around the desk and talk until the fire burns low, trying their best to keep their chatter light—servants’ rumors about the visiting nobles, romances between minor lords, nothing heavier than what can be overheard from the squires and stablehands. Arthur’s eyes have fallen shut. He doesn’t join their gossip, but he still smiles where they hope he would. Merlin yawns and bids them goodnight after the bells chime at midnight.
When they lie down in their bed, Gwen reaches for Arthur and holds him. He is shaking still.
Why did you ask this of me, Ygraine? Is it because you know I can never refuse you? Is it because you know how weak I am for you? Because you know how much I love you?
Didn’t you love me once?
Gwen still lives in her room off the antechamber of what used to be Morgana’s suite. All the furniture has been covered with drapery to ward off the dust, and Gwen picks her way by torchlight through the pale figures every time she goes back in the evenings. The more nights she spends with Arthur, the more the somber evening stillness of the chambers takes her aback when she returns.
She could ask for a new room. She is the sister of a knight, the head maid for the women in the castle, and their new king’s favorite besides. She could be sleeping in a room with a window.
But moving seems like surrender. Half of the castle’s servants are waiting for Arthur’s new queen—a noble woman, undoubtedly, from a kingdom that would give them soldiers to push back Morgana’s fury—to boot her back to the servants’ quarters. The other half of them wait for her to take the chambers for herself, more assured in her than she is in herself. No one understands why she insists on keeping her dresses in the same small chest and sleeping on the same pallet she had slept on for the past decade, least of all her.
She still wakes up on some nights thinking she can hear Morgana’s screaming.
There is a vase set on the shrouded main table. Every sennight, she changes out the flowers—she always brings violets, when she can find fresh ones, and the sprigs of sweet-smelling lavender which Morgana always loved, and short tufts of spruce needles, and juniper berries. It is the only spot of color in the whole of the antechamber. No one comes into these rooms save for her, so there is no one to ask her why and force her to articulate her idle fantasies—Morgana coming home and seeing the flowers still fresh in her room; Morgana coming back to her, without the blood, without the war.
It is in the white-hung room that she paces now, her arms crossed over her chest. The day outside is bright, but she keeps away from the windows. The murmuring of the crowd outside still reaches her ears, despite her efforts to block it out.
She thought it would end with Uther. It hadn’t.
Gwen had been serving water to Arthur and his council when the knights dragged a boy through the doors. She knew him as the candler’s son, who let her bargain with him for the beeswax candles the seamstresses used on their late nights. He couldn’t have been a day over his sixteenth summer, and he stared at them with defiance blazing from his bruised face.
He was caught in the main square, Majesty, a knight said, shoving the boy to his knees in front of the king. Rallying for the sorceress Morgana. People were thronging about him. We found this around his neck. He tossed an amulet carved with the insignia of the Mother onto the table.
Arthur’s expression might have been carved from stone, for all the emotion he showed. It is not a crime to follow the Goddess.
He admitted to it, Majesty. To magic and treason both.
Gwen could see Arthur’s gaze darting between his advisors and the boy at his feet, and it was to Agravaine that he looked the longest. The lord shook his head, and Gwen took a short step forward, fighting to keep from reaching for Arthur with so many already scrutinizing him.
He will face the axe tomorrow, Arthur decided tonelessly, and the candler's son was dragged away. The lords turned back to their conversation, and Gwen’s stomach dropped. She stood in the corner with her head bowed, holding the pitcher of water until the council finished.
You could have spared him, Gwen grits through her teeth once the door has closed behind Agravaine.
He is a sorcerer consorting with the enemy. By the law of our land, he must die.
That law is yours to change. Gwen’s voice rose. You can stop your father’s war, Arthur—
Magic was what killed my mother. That's why my father banned it, and it killed him as well. As far as I’m concerned, he was right about it, Arthur shouted. The boy sided with Morgana. He used sorcery in the citadel. He knew what the punishment would be.
If you were his age and told your whole life that your existence is criminal, Gwen yelled back at him, and if there was even a chance for freedom, wouldn’t you risk your life for that?
Arthur stared at her flintily. Guards, he said, and he was quiet now, escort Guinevere from these chambers.
Gwen glared at the knights and held out one hand in warning. None of them touched her as she left the room.
Today is the day of execution. Arthur hasn’t spoken to her since that council meeting. She looks out the window and sees them dismantling the executioner’s platform in the courtyard, and braces her hands against the windowsill, swallowing down another scream. She’s a coward at the end of the day—too much of a coward to even bear witness. The people of the lower town mill about the spot where the axe had fallen. A girl standing under the far wall weeps furiously into her hands, hiding her face from the light. She is given a wide berth by the others in the courtyard. The town cobbler catches the eye of one the knights around the courtyard and moves to spit on the cobblestones; the man next to him pulls him away, still shielding the eyes of the boy standing between them. They are all watched with suspicion by the maids lingering next to the gates. Fear turns easily into divisions, into hate—and under the king’s law, none of these are abstracts.
There is a knock on the main door of the chambers. Gwen wipes at her cheeks with her palms before opening the door a crack. Merlin and her brother are standing there, dressed in hardy jackets. “Elyan,” she says, blinking at them. “Merlin. What are you—”
“Caerleon,” Elyan reminds her, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. “It’s only a day’s ride, but we don't know how long we’ll be gone.” He lowers his voice. “I’m sorry, Gwen.”
They had just killed one sorcerer, and now they’re off to kill others. Gwen hugs him tightly, telling herself that this is for the best. If they capture Caerleon’s king as the council had planned and use him as a hostage to negotiate a peace with the kingdom—
—the war would still go on. But it would be shorter.
“I don’t know why you have to go as well,” Gwen says, hugging Merlin in turn. For all his loyalty and stubborn grace lends him a strange strength, he has never learned to handle a sword. She doesn’t want him near the battlefield. “Arthur can put on his own mail for a few days.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Merlin says, brushing off her concern with a grin. His chin is mulishly set, belying the lightness of his tone. There are days when Gwen wonders what Arthur has done to inspire that sort of loyalty.
“Come back to me,” she tells them, squeezing their hands.
“We’ll try,” Elyan says. He flashes her a dry smile but grows somber quickly. “Gwen—I heard what happened between you and the king yesterday, but—”
Gwen shakes her head. She knows too well what happens in war—they have all been living in the midst of one for much of the last year—but that doesn’t mean she will grovel. “Tell him I wish him to go with the Mother’s blessing,” she says. “And that I will see him when he comes back.”
And with that, they leave.
When he comes back, not if—it is an empty distinction now. Gwen goes back into Morgana’s rooms and stands next to the window again. In the square below, the executioner’s platform has been disassembled. Not a drop of blood had fallen to sully the shining stone of the courtyard. Knights stand in ceremony at the entrances to the castle, their armor shining.
She does scream then, ripping the heavy coverlet off of the loom in the corner with a mighty swing of her arms. Dust motes are flung into the air, catching in the sunlight that filters through the windows, and Gwen clutches the dirty fabric to her chest as she takes great, heaving breaths.
Morgana had stood at that window for a decade and watched as her people were killed for nothing more than the fact of their lives. Maybe they should be grateful that Camelot is still standing rather than wondering why Morgana turned to hate.
Gwen carefully drapes the sheet back over the beams of the loom. She goes back into her little room, where there are no white-veiled memories, and digs out the half-finished panels of embroidery she had shoved to the bottom of her weaving basket when Morgana left her for good. Embroidery calms her hands, much as weaving mail did when she helped her father at the smithy. The panels can go to another lady after she is done with them. There's no use in wasting good silk and handiwork.
Morgana's household disbanded when she left. Her maidservants became castle laundresses and cook's apprentices; the women who wove glories of wool and silk under her direction now earn high marks weaving and sewing in the lower town. Gwen visits their shop when she has time. She misses them—Letitia, the oldest, who accompanied the lady Ygraine when she first came to Camelot. Mary and Isabella, who teased her endlessly when she wore the tokens of knights and princes. Julia—Gwen was the one who first taught Julia how to weave. She was half a year past her ninth name day when she joined the royal household and had cried on her first day in the castle, overwhelmed by the stone walls surrounding her. They sometimes let Gwen sew with them still, but they call her my lady, and their banter is not so free as it was before.
She makes her way to the seamstresses' room on the east side of the castle, where morning sun streams in. It is as airy and bright as she remembers, the windows thrown open to allow the summer breeze to waft through. The last time she was here, she thought Morgana was back with them, and that she would be able to shield her lady from any evil the world could hurl against them. Much has changed since those days. There used to be five chairs in the room, set next to the windows where they can catch the most sun, and the women would sit there with their laps overflowing with fabric. There is only one chair in there now, and one seamstress, humming as she mends a wall hanging. Her dark skin is burnished in the light, short-cropped curls bobbing in front of her face as she squints down at the ripped weaving and frowns.
She jolts to her feet when Gwen appears in the doorway. "My lady—" she starts, bending in a curtsey.
"Please." Gwen's knuckles are ashen around the handle of her basket. "Don't."
The woman starts to curtsey again before catching herself.
Gwen slowly steps into the room and settles on the floor against the far wall. "I'm Guinevere," she says, holding out her hand. "Gwen, for short. I don't think we've met yet."
The woman looks at her hand warily. "I should be giving you this chair, shouldn't I," she says in a too-level tone, with the sort of dread Gwen associates with the council, or the fighting fields. Gwen bursts out laughing. She sounds a little panicked, even to her own ears.
"No, absolutely not," Gwen assures her. "I know how long you work for a chair in here. It was six months before I got mine, the first time around."
"My name is Imogen." She finally shakes Gwen's proffered hand. "I started in the autumn, my lady. I didn't have to work for a chair; the room was empty when I came and I just—brought one in."
There were once six chairs in the room, allotted to them at Letitia's discernment. Gwen doesn't want to think of this room ever being empty and bare. "Then you are lucky," she tells Imogen.
"I suppose so, my lady."
"Imogen—call me Gwen. Please." Gwen waves at her skirts, spilled as they are all over the floor. "You can hardly call me a lady when I am sitting like this, can you?"
Imogen doesn’t answer. She turns haltingly back to her mending, and Gwen starts to unroll her fabric panels, picking out the threads where she had left off from the embroidered flowers. They glitter in red and gold on the burgundy field, unfinished.
They work in silence. Imogen doesn't start humming again, and she keeps her every motion stilted and small. Gwen can't remember a time when the room had been so quiet.
"Letitia told me to look out for you," Imogen says suddenly. "But—then I thought—why would you come back here?"
Gwen pulls the fabric closer to her face, working on the tiny center of a rose. "Because I want to," she says softly. "Because—I miss it here."
"You take your supper with the king, and you miss working your fingers raw on a hellbound little flower?" Imogen asks in disbelief. "We bleed all over those damned dresses, you know, and we don't even get to wear them."
Imogen's scoffing, untarnished by any veneer of formality, makes Gwen smile. "No one thinks to say that in court," she says by way of an answer.
Imogen picks up a corner of her tapestry before setting it down again. "I wouldn't," she declares. "Come back, I mean."
Gwen nods. "Then I hope the day will come when you will not have to."
The breeze filtering in through the window tickles at their hair. Imogen starts to speak, but she snaps her mouth shut before she says much of anything. Gwen ties her curls back into a bun and starts to embroider in earnest. She can feel the weight of the other woman’s stare on the back of her neck and tries to ignore it.
"Do you want to hear about them?" Imogen breaks the silence again. Her voice is hesitant. "The others."
"I would love to," Gwen says, and she hopes Imogen can hear the thank you beneath her words.
Imogen lets her sew the day away, and listen to her as she recounts the loves and lives of the people Gwen doesn't see in court. Mary and her wife had taken in a ward, a sweet girl of three who lost her parents in a border raid and loved to sing along to Mary's lullabies. Isabella ran away with a travelling acrobat for a month and then came back with all sorts of stories about faraway lands. Julia is being courted by a stablehand with beautiful eyes. Sarra accepted an apprenticeship with the horse master. Never once does Imogen mention Caerleon, or Arthur, or Morgana.
The flowers grow beneath Gwen's fingers, a riotous bloom of petals and leaves racing across the fabric like the meadows. On the days when the court babbles too loudly and the halls of the castle grow too narrow, she finds herself thinking longingly of her needle and thread, or the fire-bellows she had pumped when she was too young to handle the tongs. Her father once told her that she had uncanny luck with iron—she could sharpen any blade and set it true, lead a thread with her needle through any fabric and never have it break. Take dead metal and make it live.
Iron and silk have always been easier for her to understand than the push and pull of human action.
The party comes back within the sennight, and Gwen exhales a sigh of relief when she counts their number and sees that they are none the lesser. Their armor glitters under the road-grime that has sunk between the rings of their mail. She finishes a petal on her panel before setting the fabric aside, taking care not to lose the needle. The king and his head knight must address the council of lords before tending to their personal affairs, so she has time. She goes to hug her brother and takes her meal in private. When the evening comes, she walks through the halls with a gait that is almost leisurely, slipping by the guards outside of Arthur’s chambers to wait inside. His desk is still scattered with war maps. There should be less red on them now, with Caerleon on their side.
Arthur steps through the door, tired but unwounded, grubby from travel. She does not hesitate to hold him tight, despite the dour glare Agravaine aims in her direction. “Did you miss me?” he asks with a wan grin.
Gwen nods. She brushes his fringe from his eyes. He seems wearied beyond the toll of a mere sennight’s travel.
“Gwen,” Merlin calls from the corridor. “Can I get a hand with something?”
Arthur lets her go, pressing a fleeting kiss to her hand. Agravaine shuts the door behind her, and she turns to Merlin, reaching for one of the bundles by his feet.
He pulls her into a side alcove instead, peering around to make sure they are alone. It takes a moment for him to say, “Arthur killed Caerleon’s king.”
Gwen inhales sharply. “What? He—why?”
“I don’t know.” Merlin worries at the edge of his nail with his teeth. “We had captured the king, as was planned. He was brought back to our camp and refused to sign the treaty, and Arthur—killed him.”
Gwen sinks back against the wall, letting her head tip back and rest on the stone. “That’s—senseless,” she says, her words uncertain on her tongue.
Treaties take upwards of a sennight to negotiate. No king would be fool enough to sign a treaty in a temporary camp, with a sword to his neck—a ceasefire should have been called, a period of negotiations set, hostages released in a gesture of goodwill from both sides. Killing Caerleon’s king can only be one of two things: a gesture of cruelty, or a confession of desperation.
Camelot is not yet desperate in her war. But Gwen has grown up alongside Arthur and known him before he stepped into his duties as crown prince; she has seen him treat maids callously and throw knives at pages, unleashing his temper on people who did nothing to deserve it. He had the capacity to be foolish and haughty, close-minded and prideful and ruthless—and he has also learned over the years to remember, and with that, to regret. He could be cruel, from necessity or grief or ignorance, but she has never seen him indulge in cruelty for its own sake.
Who is telling Arthur that cruelty makes a king?
The door opens, and Lord Agravaine leaves without a glance in their direction. Gwen stops Merlin from rushing to the door with a hand on his arm. “Give me some time with him,” she says, and he nods, his lips pressed thin.
Arthur is sitting at his desk, head cradled in his hands as he studies his maps. “Why did you do that?” Gwen demands the moment she enters.
He doesn't ask her to clarify. “It was a display of strength, Guinevere. His queen will surrender without him.” Arthur feigns confidence well, but she can hear the tremor running through his words. His hands arefisted on the table.
“You killed her husband. She now commands her kingdom’s army, and they’ll fight for him as they would for a martyr.”
“You make it sound like I slaughtered him in his sleep,” Arthur snaps. “I returned his body to Caerleon in state. Surely that counts for something.”
Desperation or cruelty. Without Agravaine there, he sounds only desperate. “It counts for nothing. He's still dead. Camelot will be plunged into war.”
“We are already at war.”
In three quick strides, Gwen crosses the distance to his desk. “Annis is going to come for you,” she says, enunciating with care. She shakes his shoulders, and he doesn’t meet her gaze. “You just killed her husband—you murdered a man who surrendered to you, Arthur. Why in the hells did you do that?”
“I have to be strong for Camelot,” Arthur bites out. He finally looks at her, pained and pleading. “I need to prove myself, Gwen. I cannot show them that we are weak. Not now.”
Those aren’t his words. Gwen knows that to the core of her. She slowly lets him go, taking one step back, and then another. “Mercy is not weakness,” she tells him in parting. “I thought you’d have learned that by now.”
The next day, a messenger from the border gallops into the courtyard. He tumbles off his horse and sprints towards the castle, calling for the king. Gwen turns away from the window and hastens down to the throne room, where Arthur is holding an audience with the court. She emerges from behind the tapestries which cover the servants’ entrance without drawing the attention of the knights around the perimeter and carefully makes her way around the room to approach the dais.
“An army crossed our border at first light this morning,” she hears the messenger say. “Caerleon is marching on the citadel with all the might she has.”
Arthur forces himself to ask, “Who leads the army?”
“Queen Annis, your majesty.”
Do you know who will die because of what you asked me to do?
I tell you their names: Analise, Warsena, Iphianassa, Evadne. I grew with them and learned with them, and they will be the first to fall to the arrows. Half of your city will burn—the herdsmen and farmers and healers and weavers, anyone who has ever lit a flame to warm the winter nights. Aulide, the cook’s daughter, will lay her own head on the altar. Colette and Claudius and Eleni and Portia and Cymbeline will all drown. Thousands will die, by iron or flame or by cold water, weighed down with stones. The Isles I have sworn to protect and uphold, where the Goddess’ arts were taught to me, will be razed, and all the priestesses will be burned, begging and pleading, or they will throw themselves onto the pyre when they can no longer bear the sight of so much death. The Valley will be filled with corpses. We will all be slaughtered, and our blood will run like the rivers, and I will bear witness to it all to repay for my sins.
But you are Ygraine de Bois. You believe you can make prophecy bow. After I finish telling you the names of the people who will die for you, you kiss me and tell me the future is never fixed. You swear that your husband would never be that cruel. You smile at me, and though I do not doubt the deaths to come, I nevertheless think—it will all be worth it.
The messenger is ushered away and offered a room in the castle for the night. He will return to the front in the morning, wherever it has shifted. The lords and knights mutter fearfully among themselves as they disband, fretting about the risks to their crops and their flocks. Arthur rises from his throne and starts to pace in short, jerky circles as his uncle watches on. Neither of them notice Gwen where she stands to the side of the dais.
“We can evacuate the citadel,” Arthur decides. “Reduce the number of deaths, when the army gets here.”
Agravaine frowns. “You cannot abandon your people like that.”
“I—didn’t you hear what I just said? I want to make sure my people don’t die, uncle.”
“But this city is their home.” Agravaine steps out from behind the throne and clasps Arthur by his shoulders. “If it is conquered, their livelihood will be gone, along with your royal stature.”
“Damn my stature to the seven hells, Agravaine, I just don’t want anyone else to die!” Arthur lets loose a snarl of frustration, raking his fingers through his hair. “Caerleon’s army is larger than ours by half, and twice as well-trained. Scores of people have already died in Morgana’s attacks—I cannot bear the thought of more losing their lives under my command in an indiscriminate battle.”
“But they will not.” Agravaine pulls Arthur into a hug. “You are the king, and this is your city. Your knights are the best in the land, and Camelot—” Agravaine pulls back, a soft smile pulling at his lips. He saves that softness only for Arthur, and Arthur loves him for it, which is why Gwen cannot openly snarl at him, no matter how much she wants to. “Camelot is the white city of legends. My sister loved this citadel with all her heart, with all your towers and pennants. It was here that Ygraine found a place to let her gentle spirit flourish.”
At the mention of his mother, it is like all the fight is drained from Arthur. He sags against Agravaine, and Agravaine holds him tighter. “She loved this kingdom,” the lord murmurs. “If she saw you at its head as its rightful king, she would be so proud of you. It was all she ever wanted in life—she had no greater ambition than seeing her children joyful and thriving.”
Arthur nods, letting himself hug his uncle back without the usual reserve he keeps about himself like a cloak whenever he is in court.
“Ride against them with your own forces, my king,” Agravaine continues. “Caerleon has sorcerers in their midst. The threat of magic is too great to risk even one small incursion. Your knights need an opportunity to prove their strength, and you need a victory to prove yourself to the people. The army would never obey a widowed queen like they would their true king. You can more than easily defeat them.”
Gwen believes that Agravaine is honest in his fondness for his nephew. Honest words and honesty, in the parlance of courtiers, are not the same. It doesn't take much imagination for Gwen to picture what Agravaine wants when he says again, Prove yourself, Arthur. Drive the young king to the depths of insecurity and self-hatred before swooping in to rescue him. Isolate him so he doesn't trust anyone else. Establish trust by breaking it, in the most profound of ways.
She backs out of the audience chamber and leaves through the servants’ corridor, and neither of the lords are the wiser.
“We can fight them,” Arthur tells her later that night. “My uncle wants me to wage open war. We might even win. But—we would lose so many.”
Annis and her husband have never held Camelot in high regard. They gave asylum to the people who fled from the Purges and refused to surrender them to Uther when he threatened them with war. His threats were never more than empty. Annis had more soldiers than Uther, and was more beloved by them than he was by his own. She fought side-by-side with her knights when she was young, and when it came time for her to marry, she raised one of them to the throne. Travelling bards like to sing of them—two of the best archers in the kingdoms, brought down by the arrows of love.
“It was never going to be an easy victory,” Gwen says. “No matter what your uncle might tell you.”
“Riders came in from the border towns. The army passed them by without raiding for supplies.” Arthur shakes his head. “She’s headed straight for the citadel. With any luck, we’ll ride out tomorrow and intercept her by Ancasta’s Pass.”
“You’ll have high ground there, at least.”
“Yes, but—” Arthur breaks off and rolls away, hiding from her. “I don’t want to lose any more men. I don’t want more—I don’t want any more death, Gwen. She’s only doing this because of what I did, as justice for Caerleon and her king. And if it weren’t for the city—if it was just me, and my life—I’d tell her to take what is owed to her.”
“Don’t say that,” Gwen declares. She pushes herself up onto her elbows, tugging him back to look at her. “You are our king. You have a responsibility to your kingdom. Throwing away your life would do nothing for us all.” She sets a hand on his shoulder. “You made a choice, Arthur. Now you have to atone for it.”
He sinks back into the pillows. “An eye for an eye,” he mutters. “A hand for a hand, until justice is served. Isn’t that the old saying?”
And that is how they end up with graveyards full. “There are other means of justice,” she says. “More difficult than eyes and hands.”
Arthur nods, settling his hand over hers. Outside their window, the moon is full and luminous, shining down on the castle courtyard. Uther paved that courtyard countless times, after sorcerers blasted the stones apart in their final moments on the pyre. They all grew up as children here, playing on top of the bones of those killed in the name of righteousness. Gwen has known Morgana since they were both girls. She is like her brother in that she too must be spurred to cruelty—it is why Gwen finds it bitter to blame her for her anger, for all that she mourns the lives lost in her relentless pursuit of justice.
“I’m going to invoke the right of single combat.”
She stills. “Arthur—”
“If Annis’ champion wins, I cede half this kingdom to her. If we win, Annis withdraws her army and begins a formal negotiation with us.”
Gwen knows better than to question who Camelot’s champion will be. “Not even the best sword-wielder can guarantee the outcome of a duel for blood,” she says heavily. “And that is assuming that she even chooses a knight as her champion. What if she sets a sorcerer before you? Your armor won’t do a damn thing against enchantments.”
“Then I die.” Arthur tilts his chin up. “It is the right thing to do.”
Gwen is torn between wanting to hold him and wanting to shake him. His eyes are eerie pale when the moon strikes them, burning with a defiant righteousness—he has his sister’s eyes. He has Morgana’s face too, her proud nose and sharp cheeks. Gwen traces her fingertips over his brow, remembering when she used to do the same for Morgana. It had soothed her after her bloody dreams. She presses their foreheads together. She thinks she might be crying.
“Don’t you dare make me lose another friend,” she whispers.
He leaves the next morning with his knights fanned out behind him, riding through the land like a flock of swallows. Gwen watches them from the seamstresses' room, through the wavering window glass.
"We're at war, aren't we."
Imogen does not phrase her words as a question. Gwen allows herself to exhale a single shuddering breath before she turns away from the window. "Hopefully, it will end soon.”
She and Imogen take their seats. Imogen had dragged another chair into the room for her. She told Gwen that she didn't want to spend a month living in a rat-infested cell in the dungeons for letting a royal lady sew on the floor, and no amount of reassurances and protests from Gwen convinced her to drop the title.
"Is it the Lady Morgana?" Imogen asks.
“Lady no more.” Gwen starts on her flowers again. “They call her the sorceress, or the priestess.”
"But you don't, my lady."
Her needle stills. “No,” Gwen says. “I suppose I don’t.” She turns to Imogen. “How much do you know about Morgana?”
Imogen glances at her, with her expression carefully schooled into blankness. Gwen knows that her use of Morgana’s name—with no title and no condemnation, with a casualness only years of closeness could grant—is as good as a confession. What crime Imogen will see implicit in her confession, Gwen does not know.
“Not much, my lady,” Imogen finally replies.
They both turn to their work, and the quiet settles again.
I have spent my whole life learning to scry the paths of destiny, and when I see you smile, I forget it all. I believe, against everything I know, with a surety meant for children and fools, that fate itself will change for you. How can it not? You have bent a Pendragon to your will, and a Priestess. That must surely be like bending fate.
I have never seen you so happy, Ygraine. You do not believe me when I tell you how many will die for you. I hate myself for telling you that your happiness has a price. You smile at everything, at the sunlight, and the flowers on your sill. You shine when he kisses your hand—you shine like the sun when it emerges from behind the rosy clouds of dawn and sets the lands aflame, and I watch and think, by the gods, by the Mother we serve, who would not let cities burn to see you smile?
People far better than Uther, I suppose. People far better than me.